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The Designer's Notebook: The Act - Emotion Control with Single-Knob Gameplay

Two
weeks ago I was privileged to watch a new kind of gameplay being
born... or perhaps a very old one being reborn. No, I'm not talking
about Will Wright's bombshell announcement at the Game Developers'
Conference. This is something simpler, and very different. But first,
a little backstory.

Omar
Khudari is one of those game industry people you don't hear much
about. He's a successful entrepreneur who used his business acumen
(and wise choice of partners) to build a multi-million dollar company,
sold it, and quietly disappeared into obscurity for a while. The
company was Papyrus Design Group, which for many years created the
most realistic hardcore racing simulations on the market. Omar's
partner, Dave Kaemmer, supplied the passion for racing, and Omar
the commercial know-how and managerial skill.

I
first met Omar when we were at college together, and I had one of
my most important gaming experiences while playing a computer game
with him. He was actually with me the night I got spooked playing
the original text-based Adventure, as described in my earlier
column "How
to be Weird." This was the first time I had ever experienced
an emotion (other than triumph or dejection) while playing a computer
game. Adventure was simple and crude by modern standards,
but if you have a vivid imagination and you play it very late at
night in a vast silent building, it can still scare you.

Enter
Edgar the window-washer.

Although
he was required by circumstances to be an executive, Omar has always
been a game designer at heart. Ever since that night at the computer
center, and all through the Papyrus days, he has wanted to explore
the issue of emotion in computer games - and above all, to explore
it in a simple, accessible way. Now he's getting his chance.

Omar's
new company is called Cecropia (pronounced "se-KRO-pia").
They're making a coin-op game about emotion, controlled by the earliest
of videogame input devices, a single knob. They call their game
a "filmgame." It's an animated cartoon built by highly
experienced ex-Disney animators, still working with pencil and paper
in the traditional manner. The characters aren't gawky mo-capped
3D models whose polygons are showing; they're beautifully drawn
2D people whose feelings and state of mind are visible in every
frame - true personality animation. They're charming, tough, sexy,
aggressive, sweet, goofy, and just plain fun to watch.

The
game is called The Act, a reference to its dramatic nature
and the fact that the player "gets into the act." Here's
how it works. Edgar, a window-washer several stories up on the outside
of a hospital, sees Sylvia, a beautiful nurse, through a window
he's cleaning. He starts to fantasize about meeting Sylvia in a
Casablanca-style nightclub. After some introductory footage,
the game becomes interactive. The object of the first level is to
help Edgar to get Sylvia's attention and persuade her to dance with
him in the nightclub. By turning the knob, you control how direct
Edgar's approach is. Go too far, and Edgar will pounce on Sylvia,
causing her to walk off in disgust. Be too timid, and Sylvia gets
bored and leaves. Use a delicate touch, and she responds well. Since
time keeps moving forward, it requires a good sense of control and
timing - classic precision-oriented gameplay with a completely new
objective.

The
Act isn't all about flirting, though. After the first act, Edgar
returns to his window-washing and goes through a wacky series of
adventures, each requiring the player to control Edgar's responses
to emotionally tricky situations. At one point he has to successfully
impersonate a doctor without getting caught; at another he's trying
to calm Sylvia down when she's about ready to clobber him.

Pre-rendered
animation has been done before in coin-op games, but this is no
Dragon's Lair. In Dragon's Lair you had to make split-second
yes-or-no decisions with few clues about which was right. The wrong
decision meant instant death. In The Act, you're not making
binary decisions but trying to control a situation with skill and
finesse. The control mechanic has more in common with a driving
game than a shooter, but the theme is unrelated to either. If you
blow it, you lose a life and the game rewinds to the beginning of
the scene for you to try again. Since this is a coin-op game, you
get the traditional three chances. If you make it through all eight
acts, you've won the game. Cecropia's business model depends on
supplying new stories for the machines at regular intervals to keep
people coming back.

Single-knob
gameplay goes all the way back to Pong, of course, but what
Cecropia is doing with it is like nothing else I've ever seen. The
characters have dozens of animations, any of which can be triggered
by the right combination of circumstances in the drama - and of
course they have to merge seamlessly together. Among the tools Cecropia
has created to help them build the game is an animation database
called Flow. Flow documents the relationships among
the sequences, and also tracks the progress of drawing, scanning,
coloring, and formal sign-off on each sequence. At any point, Omar
can log into the database, watch the sequences that have been created
so far, and make sure the transitions are seamless.

You
might think that designing a game around one single input device
is horribly restrictive. After Pong, later machines adopted
more complex controllers, permitting richer gameplay: first 8-way
joysticks, then analog joysticks, and of course buttons, buttons,
and more buttons. Things have gotten to the point where there are
almost too many buttons on a modern controller - a fact which, I
believe, tends to put newbie players off. Since The Act is
a coin-op game aimed at grown-ups (it'll probably go into bars and
clubs, not arcades), Omar wants it to be as obvious and accessible
as possible. He treats the single input device as a design challenge
- one of those limitations that tends to provoke creativity. For
one thing, the knob in The Act behaves differently in different
acts of the game. Sometimes you're manipulating Edgar's courage,
sometimes his sense of humor, and so on. Even within a single act,
the way the characters respond to turning the knob varies depending
on how they're feeling at that precise moment.

And
in fact an analog knob is not really as restrictive as you might
think. In addition to its raw position, you can measure its speed
and acceleration. You can detect whether it's moving backward or
forward, and compare that to what it was doing earlier. You can
perform Fourier transforms on the data you get (it is after all
cyclic!) though what you might do the results I don't know. The
knob itself can produce results on a linear or a logarithmic scale,
or be subject to any number of other mathematical transformations.

You
can even store up the input values and intentionally respond to
them half a second late. This introduces a sense of inertia and
produces what an old boss of mine use to call the "jelly steering
wheel." A jelly steering wheel isn't really desirable most
of the time - players expect instant response - but it's accurate
for the behavior of certain things like small aircraft. An airplane
isn't a car, with high-friction rubber on asphalt implementing the
steering decisions. Instead, it uses air flowing over its control
surfaces, and that takes longer to affect the motion of the plane.
This isn't so noticeable at high speeds, but at low ones it's quite
obvious and good flight simulators implement it accurately.

I
suggested to Omar that another possible scenario for his engine
is bargaining, something I have experienced but am not very good
at. Taxis in Cairo, for example, are unmetered, so every trip is
a negotiation. You say where you want to go; the taxi driver names
a ridiculous price; you name a lower one, they name a higher one,
and so on until you meet somewhere in the middle. I have discovered
through painful experience that if you come back with a price less
than half of what they ask, they get offended - it amounts to an
accusation that they're ripping you off. Cut their price in half
or a smidgeon more, and both of you are satisfied. But it's not
just a question of proposing numbers; there's a whole social dance
that goes it - protesting, gesticulating, pretending to walk away,
and so on - all of which would make excellent animations for Omar's
artists.

Edgar
the Casanova strikes in the Casablanca-like sequence.

Another
strong point about The Act is that it has no words, so you
never get the repetitive dialog that destroys suspension of disbelief
so quickly. Everything is done with images and music, and even the
music is interactive, so the player gets audible as well as visual
feedback. Interestingly, The Act is one of those stories
in which the overall arc is linear - the sequence of acts is always
the same - but the gameplay within each act is not as linear as
it seems. The game is a simulation, after all. The approach you
choose at the beginning of each act will affect how you have to
play the rest of it.

The
whole idea is a gamble, and Omar knows it. Do adults want to play
coin-op games? Do they want to play coin-op games that are non-violent
romantic comedies, rather than just shooters and drivers? What are
the best locations to install such a game, and how much should it
cost? There are a thousand variables. Even the design of the case
is a tricky problem: it needs to attract neophyte players, and men
and women equally, something that most coin-ops don't worry about.
The game drew big crowds at the recent Amusement Showcase International
show in Chicago, partly because it looked so different from every
other game on the floor. Let's hope that translates into big crowds
around it in the bar.

I'm
impressed by the imagination, vision, and talent of the folks at
Cecropia, but I'm even more impressed by their willingness to take
a risk on a new idea. Cecropia isn't trying to find the ultimate
answer to the question of emotion in gameplay, but they've found
one answer, and a very different one from any other I've
seen.

______________________________________________________

For more information on the start-up's ethos and goals, Gamasutra previously covered Cecropia in a December 2004 profile of the company.